


i'm gonna give you that birthday feeling

by kattyshack



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Family, Fluff, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-12
Updated: 2017-05-12
Packaged: 2018-10-30 20:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10884039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattyshack/pseuds/kattyshack
Summary: Sansa's birthday is fast approaching, and a smitten but confused Jon doesn't know what's going on between them, so he certainly doesn't know what to get for her. The Starks offer their take on the matter, which is only helpful in that it makes Jon accept that he'll just have to wing it. But that might just be enough to get Sansa to admit that she likes him, too.





	i'm gonna give you that birthday feeling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> a/n: for my girl julia, who accidentally said something suggestive to me once (see title), from which this fic was born

It is twelve days, thirteen hours, and twenty-seven minutes until Sansa Stark’s birthday. Approximately, that is; it’s not like Jon has been counting. Because counting down the days until her birthday would only exacerbate his slowly encroaching panic, seeing as how he hasn’t gotten her a present yet, and it seems that every day only brings more indecision.

He can’t very well ask her what she wants, either, because he knows what she’d say: “Oh, please, Jon, you don’t have to get me anything.”

But of course he does. Jon always gives the Starks birthday presents, no matter how difficult they are. Lucky for him, most of them are easy enough. Even Catelyn Stark, who had always scared the ever-living shite out of Jon, had been a no-brainer; he’d never failed to deliver her favorite flowers, chocolates, and candles alike. Then again, mothers were easy to shop for. But the girl you’ve been mad about on some level for your entire life and who you might be dating now but you’re not quite sure? Not so much.

Oh, it hadn’t been much of a chore when they were younger. Sansa had always been very much like her mother, so Jon had taken that fact and run with it. Over the years she had accepted his gifts with a soft smile that did something funny to his stomach, because Jon had never seen her give that smile to anyone else. Now, though… Sansa isn’t fifteen anymore, and somehow it’s harder a decade later. Generally speaking, she still has the same interests and enjoys the same things, but Jon feels as though he’s exhausted all those options over the years. And if they _are_ dating, as Jon suspects they might be, possibly, he really can’t afford to fall short this year. Because if they’re dating (maybe?), it’s obviously quite fragile and he’s sure that one wrong move would shatter the whole thing. If there even is a “thing” to begin with.

They’d always been sort of close—not in the way Jon was close with the other Starks. Robb, Arya, Bran, and Rickon are like the siblings Jon’s never had; Sansa, meanwhile, is like the wife Jon wants to have.

Okay, so she’s _exactly_ the wife Jon wants to have. He’d marry her in a hot second, but he figures he should find out whether or not they’re dating before he gets down on one knee. Before he shells out for the big diamond in the little blue box, Jon should probably find out what all those dinners they go to mean. And the movies, and the way Sansa leans her head on his shoulder, or that time she “borrowed” his jacket and hasn’t actually returned it yet. Sometimes, Jon thinks she’s looking at his mouth, but then maybe that’s because he’s always looking at hers so perhaps his subconscious is just trying to even the score.

Regardless. Jon needs to figure out what the hell is going on between them before he can ask for her ring size. And since he can’t get her the diamond for her birthday, he’s going to have to decide on something else.

Twelve days, thirteen hours, and twenty-seven minutes. It’s plenty of time. _Plenty._ More than enough, really. But just in case, Jon swallows his pride and asks for help. The coffee is being passed around the Starks’ breakfast bar when he takes the plunge.

“So, erm—” he clears his throat nervously, very aware of how protective Robb is of his sister, and of the judgmental quirk of Margaery Tyrell’s eyebrow— “anyone know what Sansa wants for her birthday?”

Margaery, as per ush, doesn’t skip a beat. “To see you nude.”

 _“What?”_ Jon splutters while Robb spits a mouthful of coffee back into his mug and declares, aghast, “That’s not a birthday present!”

Arya strolls into the kitchen then, fresh from her morning run and making straight for the pantry to replace the calories she’d just burned. But the scandalized look on her brother’s face is enough to pique her interest in something besides food. “What are we talking about?”

“What Sansa wants for her birthday,” Margaery supplies, unfazed as ever, and adds more creamer to her coffee.

“Oh.” Arya shrugs as she shuffles through the array of snack foods. “She wants to see Jon in the buff. Who didn’t know that? You guys?”

She turns to jerk her chin at Jon and Robb. “You’re stupid.”

Robb makes an affronted noise. “Well how would I know that my baby sister is, you know—well—what would she want to see Jon naked for, anyway?” he finishes, looking more uncomfortable than offended now.

“Well, see, it’s easier to—” Margaery presses her lips together in thought, then turns to Arya for assistance. “How do I put this delicately?”

“Easier for Sansa and Jon to bang-a-lang if they’re both naked,” Arya says, prompting Jon’s face to flame so severely that he thinks he must be having an allergic reaction to something. He’s quite sure that Robb plans on murdering him at some point, too, but for the moment he’s too focused on Arya’s suggestive eyebrow waggle.

“Listen, you,” Robb tells her, “my sisters do not have sex.”

“Arya does.” Margaery smirks at her coffee, then takes a sip. “With _Gendry_.”

“It’s true, I do.”

“But you’re right, to an extent,” Margaery continues before Robb can protest again. “Sansa doesn’t have sex. She’s gone off men a bit since the whole—well—”

Arya very much looks like she wants to spit on something when she says, “Since Pizza Bagel started coming on to her.”

“Petyr Baelish?” Robb clarifies.

“Right, that’s what I said.”

“I happen to _like_ pizza bagels, and now you’ve ruined it.”

“Uh. I don’t care?” Arya pulls a face at him. “That creep was the last straw. Maybe you don’t know this because you don’t _listen_ , but Sansa’s had it with men using her and treating her poorly.”

“You can’t blame her, after the love life she’s had,” Margaery adds.

Arya nods in agreement. She tears open a bag of crisps and digs in. “I used to think she was rather stupid for all the romance she wanted, but honestly, after what she’s dealt with? She deserves some damn peace.”

Robb jerks his thumb at his best friend, who’s too dazed to contribute. “And seeing Jon naked is the remedy?”

“If you weren’t such a cad, maybe you’d get it.” Margaery taps her spoon against her mug, a bit annoyed that Robb is being so dense and Jon so speechless. “It’s not about the sex—well, it is, a bit, but the whole reason she’s into Jon is that he’s nice to her.”

“Wait, she’s into me?” Jon reiterates, the words shocking him from his silence. Yes, he’d certainly wondered what was going on between him and Sansa—because there had to be _something_ , didn’t there?—but to hear his wildest hopes spoken aloud felt as though he’d been struck by lightning.

“Because he’s _nice_ to her?” Robb echoes, so incredulous that he doesn’t notice Jon’s look of reproach at having been interrupted. “Is that all it takes for you broads?”

“Robb—” Arya points a threatening finger at him— “you’re being a dick. What is it with you men? First you complain because women only want ‘the bad boy,’ or some jerk who’s going to mistreat her, then you scoff when we say we’re really looking for the nice guy. The actual nice guy,” she adds before her brother can defend himself, “not the ones who say they’re nice to get into a girl’s pants, then piss and moan for the rest of their lives because they were granted _persona non grata_ instead.”

Robb raises an eyebrow. “That was quite the speech.”

“Oi,” Arya shoves a fistful of crisps into her mouth, “fuck you.”

“Wait,” Jon says again, his voice edged in both irritation and a fantastic sort of anxiety, “she’s into me? Sansa’s into me? She likes me, you mean?”

Margaery and Arya exchange eye-rolls just as Bran and Rickon enter the kitchen. Having heard the tail-end of the conversation, the latter snorts sleepily and says, “‘Course she does.”

“ _You_ know?” Robb is at his limit, and throws his hands in the air to prove it. “HOW?”

Rickon shrugs. “I read her diary.”

“Nosy prick,” Arya says through another mouthful of crisps.

“ _I_ didn’t read her diary,” Bran defends himself as he rolls his wheelchair to the fridge. “I just know everything. Even if it wasn’t obvious. I mean, honestly, how didn’t you know?” he adds, looking at Jon. “You spend enough time with her.”

 _“Alone.”_ Rickon winks at Jon, and Robb scowls at them both.

“Mhmm.” Margaery nods emphatically, then confesses, “I sort of thought you two were bumping uglies already, but then Sansa would have told me if you were.”

Jon is absolutely on fire by now, but he’d posed the question fully aware of the people he’d posed it to, so he really couldn’t have expected anything less and he can’t very well back down now. So he takes one bracing breath and asks, “What—ah—what has she told you, then?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Robb groans, and is promptly ignored.

“Well, to give you the short version since men are notoriously bad listeners—” Margaery looks pointedly at Robb, then pours another mug of coffee for herself— “you haven’t exactly been giving Sansa all the pieces to your _I’m-madly-in-love-with-you-please-notice-me_ puzzle. I know you two have been spending loads of time together, but Sansa doesn’t necessarily see what the rest of us do. But, Jon, you just don’t treat her the way she’s used to guys treating her.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Jon wants to know, because all he’d ever wanted to do was be Sansa’s good thing. He wanted to be the reason it never worked out with anyone else—because it was supposed to work out for them. For him and Sansa. “Shouldn’t I treat her like—”

“A princess,” Rickon suggests.

“A queen,” Arya amends.

“Like she hung the moon,” Bran supplies.

“Like I’ll bash your stupid skull in if you so much as look at her the wrong way,” Robb threatens, but only lightly.

“All of the above, and of course it’s a good thing that you already act as such,” Margaery finishes. “But the thing about Sansa is—”

“What’s the thing about Sansa?” the girl herself chimes in, breezing into the kitchen with three bags of groceries balanced between her arms and a bright smile for all. And god, but does she look good, Jon notices, and is sure that everyone else notices him noticing, but he’s too focused on Sansa’s leggings, sleeping cardigan, and mussed topknot to really give a shite.

“Oh, nothing,” Margaery says smoothly while Jon blushes furiously and the rest of them snigger or snort into their breakfasts. “Just that you need constant validation and to be _expressly told_ a thing before you’ll even begin to believe it because you are a shrewd, self-doubting creature who absolutely deserves the world, but god knows you’d never accept it.”

Sansa quirks a brow as she drops the bags on the counter. She sniffs at Margaery’s cup, then takes a considering sip. “How Irish have you been making your coffee this morning?”

“Not at all, darling, seeing as you went to the shop to pick up the Bailey’s.”

“Right.” Sansa spins on her heel back to the groceries, then pulls a bottle from one of the bags. “Who’s ready to kick off my birthday celebration early, then?”

“I reckon Jon might be,” Arya pipes up—entirely unhelpfully, in Jon’s opinion, but that doesn’t stop most of the kitchen from laughing at his expense. Sansa, meanwhile, gives no indication that she has any idea what any of them are talking about, and she tells them so.

Which, Jon supposes, had been part of the problem all along—Sansa doesn’t know, and now it looks as though he’s got to tell her.

* * *

It is ten days, sixteen hours, and thirty-four minutes until Sansa Stark’s birthday, and Jon decides that he really can’t wait the week-and-a-half until he settles the matter once and for all. If Sansa already doubts—as Margaery had suggested she does—that he’d even _hesitate_ to rip his own arms off if she asked him to, Jon doesn’t want to waste any more time deliberating the point.

Not that he’s actually going to rip his arms off. But then, Jon is quite sure there are other ways to demonstrate one’s affection, so he’ll probably go with one of those instead.

But—to the surprise of absolutely no one, least of all Jon, who’s just used to this sort of thing by now—things do not go according to plan.

First, he’d planned to take her to dinner. Nothing fancy or even special, because then she’d know something was going on and the pressure would surely have caused Jon to lose his nerve. Just a regular, normal dinner ten days before her birthday, for no reason other than he simply wanted to have a meal with her. At least, that was what Sansa was meant to think, and as far as Jon knows that part of the plan was set to go off without a hitch. But then Sansa had called and groaned that she was forced to stay late at work, and did he think they could push the dinner to nine, maybe ten? Of course Jon had agreed, but that little snag spelled disaster for the whole operation.

“Operation.” That’s what Rickon had called it, and the rest of the Starks had thought it so enormously funny that they did as well. Much as it made Jon grimace to think of his plan in terms of something as insidious and probably painful as the word “operation” implied, he did not have time to think on it too much. And now that it all seemed to be going up in flames, the Starks could call it a fucking lobotomy or castration and Jon wouldn’t have cared.

They were supposed to go to dinner. Then they were supposed to go on a drive to the viewpoint outside the city, where it was all laid out in glittering lights and the world was quiet. Jon was going to give her flowers and they would drink her favorite wine and then, when he’d had enough to keep himself from second-guessing, he was going to _tell her_ and then… Well, he assumed she’d take it from there.

“So you’re going to take my sister to _park_ , is what you’re telling me?” Robb had demanded while Arya cackled wildly behind them.

Jon wouldn’t have said that, exactly, but Robb hadn’t been wrong, either. Now it doesn’t matter, though, because the viewpoint is closed off to visitors after nine, anyway.

It hadn’t been the most sophisticated plan, or even his best. But Jon had taken comfort in the fact that he was at least _doing something_ ; besides, Sansa wouldn’t have cared about the sophistication of the thing, but about the honesty of it. Jon is a mess when it comes to her, but that much he knows better than he knows anything else.

But even the simplest of plans can fall apart, a fact with which Jon is quite familiar, thank you very much. The good news is that with his extensive background in the fallout of his unsuccessful schemes, Jon has acquired a special talent to “just wing it.”

So when Sansa stumbles into her bedroom at a quarter to ten, kicking at her shoes and grumbling about her _stupid fecking prick of a boss_ , it’s to find a bottle of wine on her nightstand and Jon Snow sitting on her bed with flowers in his hand.

“Hello,” he says cheerfully when Sansa greets him with a small, surprised shriek.

“ _Christ_ , Jon,” Sansa breathes, one hand pressed to her jumping heart. “You can’t sneak up on a girl when she’s been at the office for fourteen hours. I’m not exactly at my observational best here.”

 _According to Margaery, you never are_ , he thinks about saying, but such a comment would take too much explanation afterwards. It’s been a hell of a day, and now that Jon’s here, knowing he’s actually, finally going to do this, he feels a strange sort of calm that encourages him to stay on track.

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding particularly sorry, a fact which Sansa points out as she flops down on the bed next to him.

“Wine,” she requests, so Jon pops the top and hands the bottle over. For someone drinking while lying on their back, she takes an impressively long swig without coughing it up, then asks, “What are the flowers for?”

Jon’s newfound confidence falters a bit. “Erm. You.”

“Really?” Sansa props herself up on her elbows, a gleam of pleasure sparking her tired eyes. “You bought me flowers? Jon, you softie. You didn’t have to do that. Honestly—oh, god, I feel like such a tit now. I had to all but cancel dinner with you, and you show up with wine and flowers.”

Jon shrugs and sets the bouquet on the window ledge. “It’s your birthday.”

“Not yet, it’s not.”

“That’s not what you said when you spiked everyone’s coffee the other day.”

Sansa chuckles around another pull of wine. “Still, you didn’t have to do this. Maybe it’s only the exhaustion talking, but you don’t have to do half the things you do for me, even when I’m so hopeless that I can’t even get my shoes off properly.”

She kicks one foot in the air to demonstrate and, indeed, she’d only been able to get her shoes about halfway down her heel before she’d given up.

An idea strikes Jon then—an idea that might make up for his failed plan to “declare his undying love,” as Arya had put it, only she’d done so with some amused but excessive eye-rolling.

“Well, as long as I’m doing things for you…” Jon slides from the bed onto the floor and situates himself between Sansa’s legs. Her skirt flares to her knees, and from her toes to the tops of her thighs, she is encased in nude stockings, and maybe Jon is succumbing to madness but he _swears_ he can feel the heat radiating from her when his hands touch her ankles.

He unclasps her high heels, shimmies the shoes from her feet, and somehow, miraculously, stops himself from hitching them over his shoulders and going straight for her pussy. Instead, he practices some self-control and rubs her sore toes, to which she responds with an appreciative _“Mmmmm”_ and Jon’s cock twitches in his pants. Self-control he may have, but try telling that to his hormones.

His hands move from her toes to the balls of her feet, then to her ankles, her calves, and Sansa is on the bed taking pulls of wine that only make her appreciative moans longer and louder and more frequent. At one point, Jon catches her rubbing a hand down her face, her chest hitching when he palms the back of her knee.

He’s here, he’s doing this, just as he should have done ages ago when they had dinner alone for the first time. Now that he’s here, _finally_ , he’s not going to stop. Not unless she wants him to. So just to try, Jon ducks his head and presses an open-mouthed kiss to her shin, then the crook of her knee, then a spot low on her thigh. He hears her breath catch, and then her hands are curled into his hair and she’s jerking him back. Jon confesses that he’d expected the opposite, and for once he’s disappointed when their eyes lock because he’d really wanted to get his tongue in her panties.

“Jon—” Sansa’s eyes are wide, her cheeks flushed, and her breath coming in short bursts—“what are you doing?”

“Are we dating?” he blurts. It’s not what he’d intended to say, but it works just as well as anything else he might have tried.

“What—”

“Because everyone thinks we are,” Jon continues. His hands sweep up her legs again and disappear beneath her skirt to toy with the tops of her stockings. “ _I_ think we are, but I didn’t want to be presumptuous without asking you first.”

“Well—I—” Torn between confusion and nerves and pure, unadulterated _want_ , Sansa blows a strand of hair from her face to give herself a moment to think. “Are you asking me to date you?”

Jon grins. “Sure.”

“Well, then…” She tries not to grin back, as he looks too self-satisfied for his own good, but in the end she can’t help herself. Because really, it’s about time. “That’s settled, then. But that doesn’t answer the question of what you’re doing.”

“Oh, this.” Despite her hold on his hair, Jon manages to continue his ministrations up her lovely long legs. “I’m going down on you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Call it your birthday present,” he suggests. When he realizes she isn’t wearing any underthings, his gut clenches and he curses under his breath and adds, “We’ll call it mine as well. Look at the money we’ll save.”

A laugh breaks from Sansa’s throat, a laugh that quickly turns to a sigh of pleasure when Jon nips at the soft inside of her thigh. Her fingers loosen their hold on his hair only to ruffle through his curls softly, encouragingly. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Sansa…” Jon huffs a long-suffering breath against her skin and looks up at her from beneath his lashes. “I just really, really like you, and I should have told you a long time ago.”

She swallows thickly, then her face turns up into that small, soft smile that Jon recognizes as the one she saves for him. Only him. The realization is enough to get him surging upwards, hands braced on her thighs, to take her mouth with his.

He’s here, he’s doing this, and she tastes as sweet and eager as he’d always imagined she would.

* * *

It is ten days, nine hours, and four minutes until Sansa Stark’s birthday when she opens her eyes to see Jon Snow sleeping next to her. His nose is barely an inch from her own, his arm flung about her waist and holding her close. His fingers flex into the small of her back and he sighs a satisfied mumble that sounds very much like her name.

It is ten days, nine hours, and four minutes until Sansa Stark’s birthday, and she has never felt more like celebrating.


End file.
